3XMM-DR6 logo

3XMM-DR7

The 3XMM-DR7 catalogue contains source detections drawn from 9710 XMM-Newton EPIC observations, covering an energy interval from 0.2 keV to 12 keV. These observations were made between 2000 February 3 and 2016 December 15 and all datasets were publicly available by 2016 December 31, but not all public observations are included in this catalogue (see below for more information).

Should you use the catalogue for your research and publish the results, please use the acknowledgement below and cite the paper describing 3XMM (Rosen, Webb, Watson et al., 2016, A&A, 590, 1).

This research has made use of data obtained from the 3XMM XMM-Newton serendipitous source catalogue compiled by the 10 institutes of the XMM-Newton Survey Science Centre selected by ESA.

As well as the fits and csv formats of the catalogue distributed below, the following Web-based user interfaces will allow filtering and searching of the catalogue (and give access to all or selected associated data products):

The SSC Catalogue Home Page (this page), XSA, and HEASARC allow download of the catalogue file in (binary) FITS. Summary pages and products will be available shortly through LEDAS, but are already available in the IRAP catalogue server.

The cross-correlation products of potential counterparts at other wavelengths for 3XMM-DR7 are provided through the XCAT-DB and the IRAP catalogue server.


The following table gives an overview of the statistics of the catalogue in comparison with the 3XMM-DR6 catalogue.

  3XMM-DR7 3XMM-DR6 Increment
Number of observations 9710 9159 551
Number of 'clean' observations (i.e., observation class < 3) 6164 5826 338
Observing interval 03-Feb-00 -- 15-Dec-16 03-Feb-00 -- 04-Jun-15 1.5 yr
Sky coverage, taking overlaps into account ( ≥  1ksec exposure) 1032 sq.deg 982 sq.deg 50 sq.deg
Number of detections 727790 678680 49110
Number of 'clean' detections (i.e., summary flag < 3) 596268 552951 43317
Number of unique sources 499266 468440 30826
Number of 'cleanest' (summary flag = 0, not in high-background fields) extended detections 11220 10290 930
Number of detections with spectra 162082 149998 12084
Number of detections with timeseries 162045 149968 12077
Number of detections where probability of timeseries being constant is  <  1  × 10-5 5631 5238 393

The median flux in the total photon energy band (0.2 - 12 keV) of the catalogue detections is ~ 1.9 × 10-14 erg cm-2 s-1; in the soft energy band (0.2 - 2 keV) the median flux is ~ 6 × 10-15, and in the hard band (2 - 12 keV) it is ~ 8 × 10-15. About 23% of the sources have total fluxes below 1 × 10-14 erg cm-2 s-1.

About a fifth of the observations have features that may cause spurious detections (mainly the wings of bright sources and large extended emission), and it is strongly recommended to use a filter (both per source, based on the summary flag column, and per observation, based on the observation class column).


Access

The 3XMM-DR7 catalogue, released on 2017 June 1st, is available in several formats:

Please read the Watchouts section before using the catalogues.

3XMM_DR7cat_v1.0.fits.gz FITS binary 605 MB MD5: 678d4d59627bf17f8b7bd8a7b768d423 full binary catalogue; recommended for more in-depth studies (includes information of all detections)
3XMM_DR7cat_v1.0.csv.gz CSV 657 MB MD5: 989d4d10cf0ea54af4b68d007dad0cae full ascii catalogue
3XMM_DR7cat_slim_v1.0.fits.gz FITS binary 64 MB MD5: 222db22de23dae80a54f651fe499970c reduced binary catalogue, suited for studies of unique sources (individual detection information is not included)
3XMM_DR7cat_slim_v1.0.csv.gz CSV 72 MB MD5: 07fbeccb9f2ae86e42605cebac0de9ea reduced ascii catalogue

For convenience, there are suitable SQL CREATE statements available for use with a relational DBMS in order to load the data in CSV format:

The CSV file has nulls represented by two successive commas, compatible with Postgres and (probably) other DBMS.

The slimline version of the catalogue contains one row per unique source (while the the main catalogue has one row per detection) and thus has 499266 rows. There are 44 columns, essentially those containing information about the unique sources. The catalogue also contains a column with links to the IRAP catalogue server summary pages. In the case of sources with multiple detections, the summary page of the best detection is selected (i.e., the detection with the largest exposure time, summed over all cameras), and the summary page gives cross-links to the other detections.

A separate file is also provided (table below) which contains key details about the observations used in the construction of the 3XMM-DR7 catalogue. See the list of observations for a description of the columns in the file.

3xmmdr7_obslist.fits FITS binary 0.9 MB MD5: 2402e15c3cdaae6fd61aaa30b66b250f Summary table of observations used in the catalogue

Documentation

The User Guide for the 3XMM-DR7 catalogue contains details of the catalogue production process and content. Here are quick links to


Watchouts

1) Please use SRCID and DETID columns only for the source and detection identification as these are the only columns that will persist in future versions of the catalogue, see the user guide, section 3.2. The usage of IAUNAME is not recommended as its uniqueness is not enforced over the set of unique sources.


Nomenclature and Citation

With the new 3XMM catalogue, IAU name nomenclature includes the designator, 3XMM. The IAU name is provided in the catalogue. The correct, full nomenclature for a specific detection from the catalogues is the IAU name, followed by a colon and the detection identification number, that is:"3XMM Jhhmmss.sSddmmss:detid".

Credits

The production of the 3XMM-DR7 catalogue is a collaborative project involving the whole XMM-Newton SSC Consortium:

The SSC team are grateful to the XMM-Newton SOC for their support in the catalogue production activities.

The SSC acknowledges the use of the TOPCAT and STILTS software packages (written by Mark Taylor, University of Bristol) in the production and testing of the 3XMM-DR7 catalogue.